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A really nice article by Giovanni de Briganti, Tronic. I' also wondering if the next AIP capable submarine order could go to the French?
Also, N21 wrote about getting covert help to locate the Agostas. What do you guys think the chances are that the French will help in that? They did help the British with the Exocets in the Falklands.

They actually helped the Argies not to get nuked

No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

Contrary to David Cameron's remarks; the Eurofighter had its own shortcomings.

Turbulence ahead with Indian jet deal

The Indians, stormed “senior government sources,” had gone for the “Asda option instead of Waitrose”.

By Andrew Gilligan9:30PM GMT 04 Feb 2012

By preferring the French Rafale jet rather than the British-built Typhoon, they rejected, according to the Prime Minister, a “superb aircraft with far better capabilities”.

How dare they, asked MPs, snub Britain, which had given them £1.2 billion in aid? One newspaper even blamed the decision on the Gandhi family.

The truth about Britain’s “failure” to land the £6.3 billion Indian military jet deal — and the thousands of jobs it will sustain - is different. The game is not yet over.

But if we do lose, it will have nothing to do with the Gandhis, or the aid — which, as we report today, the Indians simply do not care about either way. It will be because of our own mistakes.

Senior Indian figures and military aviation experts have told The Sunday Telegraph that British defence cuts played a key part in India’s decision to prefer France for the huge 126-warplane contract. But they said the deal could still be rescued for the UK.

“For David Cameron to say that Typhoon has far better capabilities is embarrassing, and I say that as a strong supporter of the aircraft,” said Jon Lake, defence editor at Arabian Aerospace magazine, and an expert in Asian procurement.

“It would have been true to say that it has better potential than the Rafale, but thanks to the cheeseparing of our Treasury, and the other Typhoon partner nations’ treasuries, that potential has not been realised yet.”

Key to the Indian decision, said one senior defence source in Delhi, was the country’s wish for a radar and set of weapons which already exist on Rafale — but which are not currently present on Typhoon.

The French jet can launch a wide suite of smart weapons including Scalp, an air-launched cruise missile, Exocet, an anti-ship missile, and AASM, a precision-guided bomb with extended “stand-off” capability allowing it to be dropped from further away, reducing the risk to the pilot from anti-aircraft fire.

It also has an advanced reconnaissance pod and the latest electronic scanned array radar. This combination of capabilities proved highly effective in the recent war over Libya.

Typhoon currently has none of these things. The RAF badly wants the aircraft to have Scalp's British equivalent Storm Shadow — along with the anti-tank Brimstone missile, a reconnaissance pod, and the radar.

These capabilities, apart from the radar, are currently available on the RAF’s Tornado jets and were heavily used by the British in Libya. But their arrival on Typhoon has been delayed by defence cuts.

“For the Indians it’s all about credibility,” said Mr Lake. “If they believe what the Typhoon consortium told them, then by 2018 Typhoon will do everything that Rafale does now. But they clearly don’t believe it, and I don’t blame them, given the programme’s history of delays and cost overruns.

“At the moment, Typhoon can drop a laser-guided bomb, and that’s it. The combination of Typhoon and Tornado was quite effective in Libya. But on its own, Typhoon was less versatile than the Rafale.”

Tim Ripley, of Jane’s Defence Weekly, said: “The RAF are desperate for further weapons on the Typhoon but it is something the Treasury have been trying to avoid doing. This is a crucial test of the Government’s export rhetoric. The Indians ask why they should buy this kit for their own aircraft if we won’t put it on ours.”

Typhoon is built by a four-nation consortium of Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain. The Indian marketing campaign was led by the Germans, a decision which Mr Lake described as “clearly mad” given India’s historic ties with Britain.

The culture and structure of the Indian Air Force is still heavily influenced by its British origins, with identical ranks and near-identical Air Force blue uniforms.

“The Typhoons they sent to India [for evaluation] were German, flown by German aircrew, but the Germans have a completely different culture,” said Mr Lake.

“It was mindblowingly inept.”

The British Typhoon contractor BAE was later brought in to partner the bid in apparent acknowledgement of the mistake.

Despite these failures, both Indian and British defence sources say that the contract could still be rescued for Typhoon.

A spokesman for BAE said: “The assessment made last week was basically a view from the pricing committee. There’s an awful long way to go before there’s a signed contract. It is far from a done deal.”

Though Typhoon is currently less well armed than Rafale, it is probably the more capable aircraft.

Experts say it can deliver a higher kill-loss ratio in air-to-air combat than the French jet.

“If they take the Rafale, the Indians will have to continue to rely on their Sukhoi 30s [fighters] for air dominance,” said Mr Lake.

“That’s all right if you are fighting Pakistan. But if you are fighting China, who also have Su-30s, you are not going to win.”

Commercially, Rafale has a track record of “winning” at this stage of a competition, then being overhauled in the final stretch.

The aircraft was selected as preferred bidder for a 60-jet order by the United Arab Emirates, but was then dropped as “uncompetitive and unworkable in commercial terms” by the customer, though there were reports last week that it might be back in the running.

Typhoon is now again in contention for the UAE business. Rafale was preferred by the Swiss air force, but the Swiss government chose the rival Gripen fighter instead. A supposed order with Brazil has also failed so far to materialise.

The Rafale has been assessed by the Indians as cheaper than the Typhoon.
The prices offered by the two bidders are secret. But official figures for Britain’s spending on the Typhoon, compared with France’s spending on the Rafale, appear to suggest that the British jet is slightly cheaper, though the science is very imprecise and cost figures for the same aircraft can vary by up to 40% depending on what is included.

Mr Lake said: “I would suspect when the Indians probe hard into the French price they will find that it is not satisfactory and hasn’t included things.”
Yet even if the Typhoon does, in the end, come through, it will not be the British jobs bonanza that some reports have claimed.

Because the aircraft is a four-nation joint effort, Britain would only have a 37 per cent share of the deal. And perhaps the most important part of the bargain for the Indians is that they want more than half — and perhaps up to four-fifths — of the aircraft to be manufactured in India.

Even on the Indian-made jets, substaintial components would still be British - but we could end up with less than a fifth of the actual work.
In other words, Britain may end up with less than 10 per cent of the production work on the deal.

It is still a good bargain, though, according to Tim Ripley.

“The real value is not in the assembly of the planes,” he says. “It is being involved in their future support and development over the next 40 years, it is keeping the production line going, and it is being embedded with one of the world’s major economic players.

“It is the life-support system for the British military aerospace industry. That is why it is so important that we get this right.”

As for all the rumblings in Britain over its aid. A little ugly but a well needed reality check.

India tells Britain: We don't want your aid

India’s Finance Minister has said that his country “does not require” British aid, describing it as “peanuts”.

Pranab Mukherjee and other Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The disclosure will fuel the rising controversy over Britain’s aid to India.

The country is the world’s top recipient of British bilateral aid, even though its economy has been growing at up to 10 per cent a year and is projected to become bigger than Britain’s within a decade.

Last week India rejected the British-built Typhoon jet as preferred candidate for a £6.3 billion warplane deal, despite the Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, saying that Britain’s aid to Delhi was partly “about seeking to sell Typhoon.”

Mr Mukherjee’s remarks, previously unreported outside India, were made during question time in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament.

“We do not require the aid,” he said, according to the official transcript of the session.

“It is a peanut in our total development exercises [expenditure].” He said the Indian government wanted to “voluntarily” give it up.

According to a leaked memo, the foreign minister, Nirumpama Rao, proposed “not to avail [of] any further DFID [British] assistance with effect from 1st April 2011,” because of the “negative publicity of Indian poverty promoted by DFID”.

But officials at DFID, Britain’s Department for International Development, told the Indians that cancelling the programme would cause “grave political embarrassment” to Britain, according to sources in Delhi.

DFID has sent more than £1 billion of UK taxpayers’ money to India in the last five years and is planning to spend a further £600 million on Indian aid by 2015.

“They said that British ministers had spent political capital justifying the aid to their electorate,” one source told The Sunday Telegraph.

“They said it would be highly embarrassing if the Centre [the government of India] then pulled the plug.”

Amid steep reductions in most British government spending, the NHS and aid have been the only two budgets protected from cuts.

Britain currently pays India around £280 million a year, six times the amount given by the second-largest bilateral donor, the United States. Almost three-quarters of all foreign bilateral aid going to India comes from Britain. France, chosen as favourite to land the warplane deal, gives around £19 million a year.

Controversial British projects have included giving the city of Bhopal £118,000 to help fit its municipal buses and dustcarts with GPS satellite tracking systems. Bhopal’s buses got satellite tracking before most of Britain’s did.

In India, meanwhile, government audit reports found £70 million had disappeared from one DFID-funded project alone.

Around £44,000 of British aid was allegedly siphoned off by one project official to finance a movie directed by her son.

Most aid donors to India have wound down their programmes as it has become officially a “middle-income country,” according to the World Bank.

However, Britain has reallocated its aid spending to focus on India at the expense of some far poorer countries, including the African state of Burundi, which is having its British bilateral aid stopped altogether from next year.

The decision comes even though India has a £6 billion space programme, nuclear weapons and has started a substantial foreign aid programme of its own. It now gives out only slightly less in bilateral aid to other countries than it receives from Western donors.

Supporters of British aid say that India still contains about a third of the world’s poor, with 450 million people living on less than 80p a day. DFID says its programmes — which are now focused on the country’s three poorest states - save at least 17,000 lives a year and have lifted 2.3 million people out of poverty since 2005.

The junior development minister, Alan Duncan, said last week that cutting off British aid to India “would mean that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, will die who otherwise could live.”

However, Mr Mukherjee told the parliament last August that foreign aid from all sources amounted to only 0.4 per cent of India’s gross domestic product. From its own resources, the Indian government has more than doubled spending on health and education since 2003.

Last year, it announced a 17 per cent rise in spending on anti-poverty programmes. Though massive inequalities remain, India has achieved substantial reductions in poverty, from 60 per cent to 42 per cent of the population in the last thirty years.

Emma Boon, campaign director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It is incredible that ministers have defended the aid we send to India, insisting it is vital, when now we learn that even the Indian government doesn’t want it.”

As long ago as 2005, MPs on the international development select committee found that India “seems to have become increasingly tired of being cast in the role of aid recipient.” In their most recent report on the programme, last year, they said that British aid to the country should “change fundamentally,” with different sources of funding. The report praised a number of DFID projects, but questioned others.

As well as the Indian government, many other Indians are sceptical about British aid. Malini Mehra, director of an Indian anti-poverty pressure group, the Centre for Social Markets, said aid was “entirely irrelevant” to the country’s real problems, which she said were the selfishness of India’s rich and the unresponsiveness of its institutions.

“DFID are not able to translate the investments they make on the ground into actual changes in the kind of structures that hold back progress,” Ms Mehra said.

“Unless we arouse that level of indignation and intolerance of the situation, aid will make no difference whatsoever.”

Mr Mitchell last night defended British aid, saying: “Our completely revamped programme is in India’s and Britain’s national interest and is a small part of a much wider relationship between our two countries.

“We are changing our approach in India. We will target aid at three of India’s poorest states, rather than central Government.

“We will invest more in the private sector, with our programme having some of the characteristics of a sovereign wealth fund. We will not be in India forever, but now is not the time to quit.”

DFID declined to comment on why it had asked the Indian government to continue with a programme it wanted to end.

I wonder if the arrogant fucker would say the same to the impoverished peasants.

Sir,

Please allow us to take care of the impoverished peasants. We have officially relieved you of this painstaking obligation, precisely on 15th Aug 1947.
Let's now play the buyer/seller thing with a bit more clear mind and heart.

Please allow us to take care of the impoverished peasants. We have officially relieved you of this painstaking obligation, precisely on 15th Aug 1947.
Let's now play the buyer/seller thing with a bit more clear mind and heart.

Point still stands, irrespective of politics. I wonder whether or not a few peasants would be grateful of 1.2 Billion pounds in aid. Infact, since they don't need aid at all, why bother throwing government funds at development programs in poor regional areas at all. Same goes for any country. I suppose the poor that needed heating oil in the U.S couldn't really care if it came as a political stunt from Chavez or not! Myanmar flooding also springs to mind as a recent example of anti aid stance conviction that didn't really stand up well after a few weeks - just so long as the planes that landed didn't have 'USAF' on them.

Clarified -

Politics standing, WGAF what aid is given where, it's not to be seen as an inducement to buy stuff outside of agreements and shouldn't be seen as such or the dummy spat as such.

Okay, so receiving a Billion dollar aid and spending 10 on Eurofighter is going to do justice to our impoverished peasants? . Flawed logic.

India didn't refuse aid out of arrogance, but because it came with strings. And its called a bribe. You don't want to give us aid because we didn't buy your fighter ? fair enough! Don't give us aid.

Aid coming with strings attached... who would have thought?!

According to a leaked memo, the foreign minister, Nirumpama Rao, proposed “not to avail [of] any further DFID [British] assistance with effect from 1st April 2011,” because of the “negative publicity of Indian poverty promoted by DFID”.

Aid

The arrogance of Pranab Mukherjee is astounding. In rural areas India ranks one of the lowest in per-capita income. Hopefully if this aid does not go through the corrupt government it has a greater chance of reaching the poor. There are many Indians who would be very grateful for this aid especially the ones without a computer trying to square up for their next meal - for whom its intended. Having said that it would be wiser if British politicians do not link its aid to arms purchases or gaining leverage. Scandanavian countries are a good example in this regard.

It should be what it is - helping the worlds poor. And you fill find plenty of poor in India all that is needed is a lesson in humility for India's pompous politicians.

Then return all the monies and gold and stuff that you Brits have stolen from India during its 200 years of occupation. As far as I am concerned, you don't have a leg to stand on. Your empire was responsible for the impoverishment of India during its misrule. We had one of the highest living standards before the British Raj. It was only after the British left, the living standard began to improve for the better. As far as I am concerned, the aid is nothing but a repatriation for the riches that British has looted. And don't forget that India was the largest tax base for Britain during WWII and we paid in million of lives for it. Witness the Bengali famine. So take your holier than thou bullsh!t and park it up yours where the sun don't shine.

Point still stands, irrespective of politics. I wonder whether or not a few peasants would be grateful of 1.2 Billion pounds in aid.

"...giving the city of Bhopal £118,000 to help fit its municipal buses and dustcarts with GPS satellite tracking systems. Bhopal’s buses got satellite tracking before most of Britain’s did."

The peasants can finally catch their buses on time. Ofcourse they are grateful!

Infact, since they don't need aid at all, why bother throwing government funds at development programs in poor regional areas at all. Same goes for any country. I suppose the poor that needed heating oil in the U.S couldn't really care if it came as a political stunt from Chavez or not!

You lost the point. Indian government is merely stating that foreign aid is negligible compared to the anti-poverty programs funded by the Indian government, and therefore GoI does not require foreign aid because it makes an extremely small impact at the ground level, and does more damage to India's image abroad.

Those remarks made by the Indian finance minister were not made in retaliation to the British politician's rants against "ungrateful" Indians awarding the French despite the aid; rather, they were made last year in Parliament when the issue of foreign aid was brought up and why it was not being stopped. The reason was that the GoI had been trying to terminate the foreign aid but the British politicians didn't want to dent their chauvinistic image at home.

Myanmar flooding also springs to mind as a recent example of anti aid stance conviction that didn't really stand up well after a few weeks - just so long as the planes that landed didn't have 'USAF' on them.

India too blocked all foreign aid to its country after the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami. However, India not only provided aid to its own people (an initial $1 billion in reconstruction and gradually increased) but also to all the countries affected, aswell as launched one of the largest military relief operations in its history mobilizing its army, navy and airforce to assist in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Maldives.

Hardly draws a comparison to Myanmar.

Clarified -

Politics standing, WGAF what aid is given where, it's not to be seen as an inducement to buy stuff outside of agreements and shouldn't be seen as such or the dummy spat as such.

British politicians surely didn't portray such after the deal was given to the French.

Originally Posted by Chunder

Aid coming with strings attached... who would have thought?!

That's the whole point.

Can't call the Indian ministers arrogant when they are being shoved aid down their throats which they don't need and than demand favours in return.

Yes, you think the finance minister was only talking about British aid? GoI wants all aid stopped.

Read again,

"...foreign aid from all sources amounted to only 0.4 per cent of India’s gross domestic product. From its own resources, the Indian government has more than doubled spending on health and education since 2003.

Last year, it announced a 17 per cent rise in spending on anti-poverty programmes. Though massive inequalities remain, India has achieved substantial reductions in poverty, from 60 per cent to 42 per cent of the population in the last thirty years."

So yes, the point isn't only about British aid, but all foreign aid.

And from the same article,

"It [India] now gives out only slightly less in bilateral aid to other countries than it receives from Western donors."

Better to put that aid to use where its really needed. Places like,

"Britain has reallocated its aid spending to focus on India at the expense of some far poorer countries, including the African state of Burundi, which is having its British bilateral aid stopped altogether from next year."

Last edited by Tronic; 07 Feb 12, at 20:02.

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